Day 3, in which we passed through 3300 years of history

Today was our first day of being offi­cial “tourists”. We went out with Jane and Nico, our guides, and five other peo­ple who are stay­ing here at Casa Colo­nial. Today’s jour­ney was to the north into the val­ley of Etla.

Sec­tions of adobe wall are every where.

First we went to San Jose de Mogote to see some of the old­est struc­tures in Oax­aca. There are mounds through out the vil­lage, most of them have not yet been exca­vated. The struc­tures were built by the Zapotecs around 1300 BCE. This site pre­dates the much more famous Monte Alban by about 1000 years.

This is not a mound or exca­va­tion, this is the new church in San Jose. Those are liv­ing plants in a bed built into floor of the aisle.

Here is one of the first areas to be exca­vated. It’s basi­cally in someone’s backyard.

These steep steps go from the court­yard up to the build­ings that are at the top. The stone is held together by cement.

On the other side of the mound are these porches.

The top hasn’t been exca­vated. You can see the out­lines of the struc­tures as you stand here. The view is of the rest of the Etla val­ley to San Augus­tine and to the right along the val­ley to the city of Oaxaca.

There is a small museum in San Jose that houses much of the mate­r­ial from the exca­va­tions. It was built in a cou­ple of rooms of the old Hacienda. The Hacienda San Jose (or Hacienda Cacique) was one of the last hacien­das to be abol­ished after the revolution.

This is one of the head­dresses from the San Jose site.

This fig­ure is the only prone fig­ure from the Zapotec era that our guide knows of.

A lit­tle ways up the road from the court­yard and porches you can climb the hill and see where the ball court was. The Zapotecs played their own ver­sion of the bloody ball game that the Aztecs played in Mex­ico City.

San Augus­tine Etla is also known as Vista Her­mosa. It sits on the moun­tain slopes and receives a lot of water from the springs above it. In the 1883 a cot­ton mill and gen­er­at­ing plant were built here. The man­u­fac­tur­ing stopped in the mid 20th cen­tury. Over the last 10 years Fran­cisco Toledo has over­seen it’s recre­ation as an arts center.

The pur­ple color in the foun­tains at the front of the build­ing was made by run­ning water infused with cochineal over the steps for a cou­ple of years. They used to be very red, now they are fad­ing to purply-pink.

The inte­rior of the cen­ter is two open floors of gallery and work­shop space.

The build­ing wasn’t the only thing that got atten­tion. The grounds are won­der­ful. There is a sys­tem of linked shal­low ponds that flow from the top of the site to the front.

From San Augs­tine Etla we went to see one of the most famous pot­ters in the area. Irma Blanco is a rec­og­nized national trea­sure. She sat down and made a small statute of a mar­ket woman for us. It took her about 10 min­utes. In this pic­ture she’s just starting.

This is Irma’s kiln. She and her fam­ily fill it and then cover it with bro­ken tiles. It is fired with wood.

This is one of her mer­maids. She loves to add flow­ers to every­thing. The black clay dries to this light gray but it turns a light tan when it’s fired.

Tagged as: hacienda, mermaid, pottery, ruins, san augustine etla, san jose de mogote